"Black Was White": Urbanity,
Passing and the Spectacle of Harlem

MARIABALSHAWa1fn1a1Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Birmingham, Edgebaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT

Abstract

Gillis set down his tan cardboard extension case and wiped his black, shining
brow. Then slowly, spreadingly, he grinned at what he saw: Negroes at every
turn; up and down Lenox Avenue, up and down 135th Street; big lanky Negroes,
short, squat Negroes; black ones, brown ones, yellow ones; men standing idle on
the curb, women, bundle-laden, trudging reluctantly homeward, children rattle-trapping about the sidewalks; here and there a white face drifting along, but Negroes predominantly, overwhelmingly everywhere. There was assuredly no
doubt of his whereabouts. This was Negro Harlem.

This is the first sighting of Harlem for King Solomon Gillis, the
protagonist of Rudolph Fisher's story "City of Refuge," published in
1925 in Atlantic Monthly. Gillis has fled the South after killing a white man,
and comes to Harlem, "with the aid of a prayer and an automobile" (3)
to escape being lynched. His arrival sees him propelled into a carnivorous
city of disorienting sounds, speed and subways until, like "Jonah
emerging from the whale" (3), he is burped up into a sunny, calm and all-black Harlem. The spectacle of a public space peopled by "Negroes
predominantly, overwhelmingly everywhere," seems to hold a utopian
promise: "In Harlem, black was white. You had rights that could not be
denied you; you had privileges, protected by law. And you had money.
Everybody had money[horizontal ellipsis]The land of plenty was more than that now; it
was also the city of refuge" (4). However, this vision of plenty and
security ultimately proves chimerical for the naïve Southerner who fails
to see beyond the surface effects of the urban scene. For Fisher, the turned
around, "black is white" world of Harlem involves complex issues of
racial agency and identification which are central to the narrative of
modernity associated with the experience of migration to the North. In
his work - and in that of Bruce Nugent and Nella Larsen, which also form
the basis of this article - we find a recurrent focus on the urban scene of
Harlem as a space of spectacular and spectacularised desire, and an
understanding of racial identity as contingent and performative within
this space.

Article Text
fn1 I gratefully acknowledge the British Academy/Humanities Research Board
Institutional Fellowship Scheme for support of this research work.